The bloodshed in Sudan is visible from space

The carnage in the Sudanese city of El Fasher has become so severe that the blood stains can be seen from space.

The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) — which attacked the capital of Khartoum two years ago, kicking off a brutal civil war — finally took over El Fasher last week. The RSF’s capture of the stronghold follows an 18-month siege that left some 150,000 people trapped in El Fasher, forcing them to live off of rainwater and animal feed. Amid a total communication blackout, satellite imagery and geolocated social media posts are among the only pieces of evidence available to stitch together a picture of the mass atrocities.

What’s happening in Sudan contains echoes of the terrible Darfur genocide in the early 2000s, when the RSF perpetrated an ethnically motivated massacre on the same populations being attacked today. But today’s civil war may pose even greater levels of violence, mass displacement, and disease. Yet, the conflict-driven famine in Sudan, the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, is both under-acknowledged and underfunded. Up to 400,000 people have died in over two years of war, though the full toll has been impossible to measure.

While negotiations over a proposed humanitarian truce are ongoing, the bloodshed seems unlikely to end any time soon. And the scale of the war has already become clear. Sudan is bleeding out. Here’s what you need to know.

Just six years ago, Sudan seemed on the verge of a democratic breakthrough.

It all started with the price of bread. In a bid to pay off foreign creditors, longtime authoritarian leader Omar al-Bashir’s removal of a vital subsidy essentially tripled the cost of goods, which sent pro-democracy protesters pouring into the streets. The peaceful protests led to the removal of al-Bashir in April 2019 after three decades of rule, with a joint civilian-military transitional council forming in his wake.

But in 2021, as the deadline for a democratic transition approached, two generals — Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who led the government Sudanese army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, head of the RSF, the paramilitary group al-Bashir had notoriously deployed to slaughter hundreds of thousands of people in Darfur two decades ago — got cold feet. Neither of them wanted to cede power to a civilian-led government, so they teamed up to successfully stage another coup.

But generals soon clashed over which force would become the country’s legitimate military power. In April 2023, the RSFs launched an attack on the capital of Khartoum, and the two sides have been fighting ever since.

How bad have things gotten?

It’s hard to visualize the scale of the calamity.

Beyond the hundreds of thousands who have been killed over the past two years, over 12 million people — roughly a quarter of the country’s population — have been displaced. A famine has raged across some parts of the country, with nearly half of the population facing severe hunger. Both sides have been accused of war crimes.

But things have gotten precipitously worse this week in Darfur, a western region of the country roughly the size of Spain. The RSF erected giant earthen walls during the siege, cutting El Fasher off from food, medicine, and humanitarian aid.

Now that the paramilitary has breached the city’s walls, the bloodshed has been unconscionable. Much of the violence has been ethnically tinged, with reports that the largely Arab RSF has been specifically targeting Black Darfurians.

The few who’ve managed to escape El Fasher “arrive so dehydrated that they cannot talk,” said Mathilde Vu, an aid worker in Sudan with the Norwegian Refugee Council, at a briefing. In one case, over 450 people were reportedly killed in a maternity hospital in El Fasher. Stories abound of rape, extortion, and mass graves. And there’s no end in sight.

In part, thanks to the work of outside actors.

The United Arab Emirates has been funneling advanced weaponry and mercenaries to the RSF for years. In return, it’s gotten gold, livestock, and farmland.

For the past two years, the rest of the world has mostly stood by while rifts seem to only widen between the war’s two main protagonists over how Sudan’s military should be structured moving forward. And the US has failed to call out or end arms sales to its ally, the UAE, given its role in fueling the war.

“What needs to happen is for the international community to wake up,” said Vu, who recently heard from people in Darfur who said they “felt abandoned.”

Even so, a core group of countries, called the Quad (the USA, the UAE, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia), have been trying to negotiate a ceasefire deal for the past few months. And, after widespread outrage over the violence in El Fasher, the RSF agreed tentatively to a new deal from the Quad to stop the bloodshed on Thursday.

But the Sudanese military, which has received support from Egypt, has largely spurned the deal, refusing to commit to the truce unless the RSF agrees to lay down its arms. And amid the recent escalation, that seems unlikely to happen any time soon.

Many of the Sudanese regions most affected by the recent violence are now completely cut off from humanitarian aid. That’s what’s made the incursion so deadly.

But there are ways you can help.

Aid workers like Vu are still actively working around the country to get survivors food, shelter, and critical medical care. And they’ll be the first to reach El Fasher if the ceasefire holds and the fighting stops.

“The world has not really met the moment,” said Vu. Massive funding gaps have forced her team to triage resources. “Do we help the people who just arrived or do we help the people who arrived last month?”

You can support Vu’s team at the Norwegian Refugee Council or other aid groups working on the ground today.

A couple of decades ago, celebrities rallied around ending the violence in Darfur, but the world’s attention quickly turned. Now, more than ever, your donations and your voice could make a big difference.